Might or was?

"Ultimately the search giant's shift over to HTML5 may in fact have been part of a long-term strategy at Mountain View, with the Gears API platform serving simply as a temporary doorstop while the company developed Chrome."

Google stated from the off, that they would like nothing more that for Gears to be redundant when the browser manufacturers (all of the main ones anyway) got their acts together and implemented the Gears features in a standards compliant way (e.g. HTML 5).